S.H.I.E.L.D. 'Window of Opportunity' - May 17

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, and then there is Ali Smith. Her novel ‘Autumn’ was kind of pessimistic but still well-written and normal; ‘Winter’ was more, um, derived, (and no, this isn’t a compliment), and her latest novel, ‘Spring’ feels like a flow of consciousness, reminiscent of James Joyce at his most…semiotic. It is anyone’s opinion if this approach works; personally, it feels more like a breakdown of the author (Ali Smith) as a person due to personal issues with it reflecting in her works, not unlike as to what is going on with J.-Ro, whose professional life post the HP books isn’t going so smoothly either.

On the other hand, there is also ‘Dynasties’, both the book and a TV series. It works in both incarnations in an intriguing and thought-provoking manner. There are flaws – we have discussed ‘Dynasties’ last year – but it still works, regardless of the flaws. Go team Attenborough and co.! Raise the natural awareness! Fight the good fight! Yeah! …Real life sucks, but not always, and now let us try to talk about AoS S6.

The adventures of the titular AoS characters continue to delight; this week’s episode – ‘Window of Opportunity’ – stared the new, (and further?), adventures of Fitz and Enoch. Enoch was the non-human alien, whom is not quite android and not quite alive…interesting. The point being, however, is that the team FE killed off ‘the Controller’, who was really a minor villain and a jerk, and are off to the planet of Kitson for further adventures, with team Jemma being close behind them. The odds of them constantly missing each other until the S6 end are astronomical, AoS almost constantly kept the FitzSimmons apart ever since the second half of S1, so they probably are not going to change this dynamic in S6. Anything else is up in the air, free for grabs.

Trivia time: not only this week’s episode took place on a backdrop of a planet that looks suspiciously like real-life planet of Jupiter, but also AoS had no idea as to what to do with languages: the Controller spoke perfect English, while at least some of his crew – the engineers – talked some sort of an authentic alien language, cough. Seriously, who do the script writers think they are? Tolkien? Then let us have Fitz drop into, or onto, Middle-Earth and help Aragorn, Gandalf, and the hobbits fight Sauron and his orc hordes, shall we? The S6 of AoS – the space part of it – has some clear and obvious influences of SW, so why not LotR as well?

…Yeah, that annoying copyright issue and everything, but regardless, an AoS/LotR crossover could be cool. Does anyone want to write it? Really, I will read it and all! Back to trivia?

…Baron Samedi’s wife in real-life voodoo mythology is called Mama Brigid. Cough, but doesn’t our detective O’Reilly have something atypical in her ancestry? Just asking… oh wait, we are discussing AoS now.

Coulson/Sarge and his people continue to be a motley crew of chaotic, unpredictable, and possibly amoral antiheroes…but there does not appear to be an outright evil vibe coming from them. Maybe there is more to them than just destroyers of worlds, as they appear to be set-up in the eyes of S.H.I.E.L.D., (Mack’s version). Moreover, the scriptwriters did their best to make Yo-Yo be, well, important in this episode, NCB got to show-off her character’s new prosthetic arms, (from the second half of S5, when Ruby Hale had cut them off with her chakram – hello Xena, agent Heartly and Lucy Lawless) and ran around a bank. Yay Yo-Yo! …Of course, the fates of Bobbi and Lance come to mind: they were made regular characters on AoS in the first half of S3, and in the second half, they got dropped completely, and now their actors are done with MCU, at least for now. (Cough, the Orville, cough). Yo-Yo and her actress have lasted proportionally much longer than they have, but still…

Speaking of new agents? The one shot by Sarge last week was an agent Fox. (Really?) And now we got agent Keller and it does not look as if he is going away in a hurry, so apparently this side of the AoS script equation got a lot of its own drama now too. Yay! Not, but AoS is doing its best to be exciting – Melinda’s fight with Sarge’s crew was certainly interesting and well-choreographed – so let’s throw them a bone and worry about anything else later.

…This is it for now. See you all soon!

CD, 'Two Player' - May 16

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. GoT seems to give it a run for its money, though, but first – C&D.

The excitement in the lives of our plucky and intrepid characters, C&D, Ty & Dy, you name them, you know them, keeps on coming. This time, they got to play in the land of the dead to rescue Tyrone from, well, dying. Yay!

…Of course the depiction of Baron Samedi was decidedly campy and possibly not very respectful towards the loa version of Hades, (just look at Riordan’s Jason Grace series to connect the dots), but then again, C&D treat the other depicted loa of the series – Papa Legba – in a very bizarre way, so there’s that.

It would be nice to move onto the living now, but firstly, we must mention Edita’s aunt Voodoo, who is officially dead, and her niece will now be the next voodooist of New Orleans…at least until the end of S2, after which it’s anyone’s guess how the cast will change. In particular, Tyrone’s family, including his mother, Adina, have changed some, Adina in particular has acquired some vigilante traits of her own, less suitable to the S1 version of her than to Mayhem.

Mayhem and detective Brigid have made their peace at last, and they are back in one body, and Mayhem is the dominant personality, for now. Honestly, we can safely say that while the cast of C&D is tight, their script is not, not so much, and while the main cast of C&D is small, the scriptwriters did not always figure out how to balance them out, as they did in AC, in the not-so-distant past. Father Delgado seems to be back, but right now, he seems to be more of a sounding board for Adina and the show never really figured out how to utilize Mayhem & detective Brigid to their full potential, (though their actress was still quite awesome, no argument here). Instead they got a storyline that meandered all over the place and will probably come to a head in the next week’s episode, when Mayhem and Tandy will face-off over ‘a girl’, most like Andre’s ‘girl Friday’, whom he had used up and discarded. Apparently, she is still alive, and can be rescued, physically, if not anyhow else.

Yes, Lia is both a victim and a villain, not unlike the canon take on Kara Palamas/agent 33 in AoS S2, but she’s treated much better here as a character, with much more respect and professionalism by C&D’s cast, which makes C&D a better show than AoS, who treats its’ characters like crap – and that brings us to GoT.

GoT S8 sucks. AoS has its own flaws, it certainly lags behind C&D, ‘Blindspot’, AC and others, but never there had been a fan petition to remake a season. In case of GoT S8 there is. Will it amount to nothing? Naturally, most petitions just vanish into oblivion, though sometimes there is some recognition of it, especially online, but that is it. There’d been a petition or something, (on top of anything and everything else) to cancel Brexit in the UK before it even got started, but the U.K. government went onwards with it anyhow, and now they’re in a worse mess than Westeros is – and I doubt that GoT S8 will have a remake.

Why? Because it is the series finale, no muss, no fuss, no S9. People are largely done with it, with ‘people’ meaning cast and crew: it is over; it’s not going any further. People have invested in it, and now they are done with it, and are moving on. To SW, if rumors are of any indication; apparently, SW has changed its’ approach again, and will release a plethora of new movies in the recent future. Will it bite them in the ass? Probably yeah, but they will act all stupid and say ‘What is that? Why? We were so sure!’ the end. Moreover, GoT is at its’ end too, and suddenly the fans’ opinions, ratings, numbers, etc. do not matter so much anymore.

Of course, it is not as straightforward as it may sound; the premiere episode of AoS S6 was summed up with a number 2.31 – the same number that came with the AoS 5x07 episode ‘Together or Not At All’. This is low number, but AoS is gamely plowing on ahead regardless. Good luck to them, and we will see them tomorrow, this Friday, hopefully.

This is it for now; see you all soon!

S.H.I.E.L.D. 'Missing Pieces' - May 11

AoS S6 is here. And?

Firstly, the obligatory disclaimer: real life can be trying, but that is real life for you. How does AoS stack up to it?

The season’s premiere, ‘Missing Pieces’, is about Coulson and Fitz, since both died at S5 finale. Now, though, Team Jemma (her, Daisy, Davis and Piper) are travelling through space, kicking alien butts and taking their numbers while looking for Fitz – and there is a giant-ass space ship chasing them instead. However, never let it be said that Simmons is not an opportunist – she used the ship’s latest attack to take her team into a new territory, to continue to look for Fitz, though the rest of her team are unhappy with her, and there is going to be drama.

Simmons’ issues with Fitz aside - by now everyone knows that the FitzSimmons make their own drama, and this season AoS just might’ve jumped the shark with them, pity – what is worth noting is that Piper and Davis have become proper supporting characters: here’s to them lasting at least to mid-season, and not just because otherwise the FitzSimmons and Daisy will have to make a lot of uncomfortable explanations to Davis’ family at least, you know? Secondly, Daisy is having her own issues – she is channeling either Ward or Morse, and it does not do her character any favors. And finally – Deke is pointedly not with them; as Marvel Entertainment accidentally showed on YouTube, Jeff Ward (Deke) and Iain (Fitz) do not get along, so they clearly had to do something about it, while keeping Jeff on the show. Why is another question; they did a half-arsed job of trying to make chemistry between him and Chloe’s Quake in the second half of S5, but apparently it didn’t stick, so no Deke in space. Pity, because he and Elizabeth Henstridge (Jemma) actually had a good thing going-on in the second half of S5…

Back within MCU, Fitz is shown at the episode’s end, being dominated, somehow, by someone (or something) called the Controller. In Marvel, it is a man named Basil Sandhurst, who is…an Iron Man villain, actually, but in MCU, Stark is dead – for now, at least – so it is an open question if this is going to be a real-life version of the man, somehow. The point is that Fitz is having his own problems – again…so, it is nothing new. The more interesting question is – where is Enoch? He was not bad back in S5, did liven up AoS somewhat, and it would be exciting to see more Chronicoms in the future AoS episodes too. The fact that Fitz is in trouble, is mentally dominated, does things that are probably morally ambiguous at best, and needs Simmons and the team to help him is nothing new – remember the S4 Framework mini-arc, anyone?

This brings us to the other half of the season’s premiere – Mack’s version of S.H.I.E.L.D. on one hand, and the appearance of ‘Sarge’, (Coulson’s look-alike) on the other. There are several characters called ‘Sarge’ already in Marvel; the main ones are Nick Fury Jr. (and now that would be an interested character to introduce to MCU proper), and a mutant for a secondary universe (earth 2099 A.D.) now more usually called Travesty.

…Yes, in S5 already AoS took its’ characters to the future, and yes, there are gifted individuals of some sort, working for Gregg’s Sarge character, so it’s always possible that S.H.I.E.L.D. will be dealing with time travellers from a new future – the old one got derailed when S.H.I.E.L.D. blew up the alien space shift and defeated Talbot/Graviton in final S5 episodes, remember? The time loop is broken, the future is free from grabs – and MCU has introduced, sort of, the concept of a multiverse in ‘Avengers: Endgame’ movie, and it might be developing this concept further in the upcoming ‘Spiderman’ movie, just look it up at the IGN YouTube channel. IGN is not perfect, but it does deliver. What is next?

The main twist here is that as contrasted by a deliberately misleading clip released earlier, this version of Coulson/Not-Coulson is no friend of S.H.I.E.L.D. at all; the man he took down was a new S.H.I.E.L.D. agent instead, but on the other hand, despite their rugged appearances and crazy behaviours, he and his people aren’t trying to intentionally & deliberately hurt people, so maybe they’re not actually evil? In this case, Mack and co. will need to invent a new strategy beyond throwing armed forces and armored vehicles at them, while dealing with new drama: Mack and Yo-Yo have broken up, and now Yo-Yo is beginning to flirt with a new character named Keller, while Mack is with May…yes, because Coulson is dead now, (so far, Sarge is being set up as someone who’s not S.H.I.E.L.D.), and because AoS had thrown them together on occasion, especially in S4. What will come out of that, aside from the generic answer – more drama – is currently unknown.

…Also, speaking of drama, Mack and May managed to persuade an old friend of Dr. Garner to work for S.H.I.E.L.D. while the FitzSimmons are in space. Since Dr. Garner was revealed to be Lash, a killer InHuman, (who got redeemed, supposedly, by rescuing Daisy from Hive and dying in the process), it’s possibly safe to take the newcomer’s moral alignment with a grain of salt; after Radcliffe and the Darkhold disaster it is better to be safe than sorry, right?

Anything else? Gabriel Luna will return to his role as the Ghost Rider…this time, on his own show. Since it will be on Freeform, his show might have more in common with C&D that AoS, so (tentatively) welcome back, Mr. Luna, to MCU! Hopefully, you will have better luck here than Blood and Palicki did – by now, they are firmly in the past/recurring character sector of AoS, alongside Dalton and Campbell; ah well, ce la vie.

As for ‘Missing Pieces’ as a whole, it did a good job by bringing out the best aspects of AoS – special effects, a decent plot, great acting and decent dialogue. Now all they have to do is to keep it up and to win back their strayed fans. Between ‘the Gifted’, ‘the Runaways’, C&D, and ‘Legion’, (though it is supposed to have its final season this year, hah), it will be a tough job, even with Netflix’s series gone, and the Ghost Rider show still being in production…

This is it for now; see you all soon!

CD, 'Vikingtown Sound' - May 10

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. Sometimes, it is bearable, but that is being deliberately optimistic. Now onto C&D?

Last night’s episode, ‘Vikingtown Sound’, continued to develop C&D’s S2 plot further. Ty & Dy are the couple, and while on their own they are rather dysfunctional, together they are unstoppable. Well, maybe not, since VS finale showed Ty’s powers fritzing out and him collapsing, so now it is up to Dy to be the rescuer instead. Detective Brigid is coming along for the ride, but she has her own complication – Mayhem.

…The good news here is that Mayhem is trying to be a hero here, and she is sort of succeeding. Whereas Andre is apparently shaping up to be MCU’s version of the demon D’Spayre, (Despair, got, it, cough? Marvel puns are usually quite awful), Mayhem is genuinely trying to stop him, and she’s succeeding, but the fact is that she’s, well, mayhem; she may not be specifically good or evil, but she is chaotic and uncontrollable, and odds are, her help comes with its’ own price, unless she’ll be able to master it and make peace with her other half – Brigid.

And then there was aunt Voodoo. Was, because Andre killed her at the end of VS. That said, before the audience was shown that Voodoo was aware of Mayhem’s interference in Andre’s plot, was maybe in contact with her, and was trying to help her – maybe? Certainly, Voodoo did not seem to be perturbed when Andre killed her with his music, the end.

Andre himself… On one hand, his evil plan is being, well, a pimp. He is running a brothel of mentally broken down girls, and Lia is his madam, essentially. Not the greatest villainous plot in history, but given the fact that so far C&D are your friendly neighbourhood heroes, this sort of evil is just what they can handle; ‘handle’ being the loose term, since so far Andre is holding their own against them, by trying to keep them apart and disharmonious. Ty & Dy, however, are getting onto him, thanks to Mayhem, and maybe aunt Voodoo…which brings us to the other side.

The voodoo. VM talks about loa, and Andre, in particular, learned about Damballah. In real life, Damballah (or just Damballa) is a serpent spirit and ‘The Grand Master’, the primordial creator of life. He is so far out of Andre’s reach, that Andre should wish to be the man in the moon instead, it would be more realistic and more up to his calibre. That said, aunt Voodoo did tell him, that he himself was becoming a loa, (a spirit/god), (but she refused to help him, and so he killed her), and on the other hand? The promo for the next week shows Ty & Dy interacting with a baron Samedi-typed character.

First things first. In the world of Robert Howard and his followers, (the world of Conan and Red Sonja), Damballa is a serpent-god of evil, he usually takes second hand to Set, who is based upon real-life ancient Egyptian demon-god Apop, Apep, or Apophis, the monstrous serpent who would eat the sun, but the Egyptians’ sun god Ra was ‘the world’s buffest grandpa’, to quote Rick Riordan, and is able to beat-off Apop nightly. The end, and if you want to know more about Apop, you should real ‘The Kane Chronicles’ trilogy of Riordan’s – it might not be as good as his PJ series, but still a fun read. The point is that in fiction serpent gods have a bad rep, (and are often conflated – never mind that there was nothing serpentine about Set in real life; it’s hard to tell just what kind of animal Set is depicted as – dog, jackal, hyena and donkey were all suggested as likely candidates, but never a snake), and then we got baron Samedi.

If in real life Damballa is the primordial creator (and is sometimes syncretized with Christ, though he has both a wife and a mistress), then Samedi is the loa of death and the dead, a grim reaper who is dressed to the nines rather than just a robed skeleton with a scythe. (He has a wife too, but it is unlikely that we will see her in C&D). Put otherwise, Ty & Dy are going to the land of the dead, and it will be a team effort to leave it – but returning from the dead to the living is always a team effort.

This brings us to AoS, and not just because on one hand this show has encounters with the land of the dead itself, and because it is returning to TV tonight, (May 10, 2019). AoS is mentioned here because Andre is a more down-to-earth version of Dr. Whitehall, (Whitehall hadn’t been a pimp, but he was trying to use the Obelisk to become a god of some sort), Lia is a better version of agent 33, (‘better’ as in ‘better depicted’) – aka a villain that is so pitiful that she’s almost sympathetic, almost, and Connors is also a ‘better depicted’ of Ward going on a redemption path. Mind you, ‘Blindspot’ in S2 did a better version of a Ward-like villain going onto a redemption path, (sort of), but we are talking about C&D here and now. Essentially, in the second plot line of VM, Connors and Ty’s mother have a showdown of some sort, have their epiphanies, and – their breakthroughs. Will they emerge as better people from this? What will happen next? Hopefully, we will able to learn next week.

This is it for now, however. See you all soon!

CD, 'B Sides' - May 2

Obligatory disclaimer: real life is not very good, to put it lightly. Now onto C&D.

In this week’s episode, ‘B Sides’, the script writers took ques from the C&D comic arc ‘Shades of Grey’, complete with a villain who enslaves others by getting into their minds and draining them of their energy, in a matter of speaking. Put otherwise, this is a variant vampire mixed with Killgrave from Netflix’s JJ, complete with a female minion (ala JJ), who has been completely brainwashed, in a matter not unlike how Kara/agent 33 was brainwashed on AoS S2.

…Yes, AoS S6 is returning to TV next Friday, (May 10, 2019), and from the current trailer, we can already see that Gregg’s new character is a villain of some sort, rather than a hero; or at least – an anti-hero. Gosh! How new and exciting! Not.

Since S1, AoS had had the following themes in its plot: doppelgangers with different alignments often played by the same actors. Dalton did it with Ward…period, and also with Hive in S3. (Hive was never Ward; Ward may not have had any powers ever in AoS TV canon, but he was the more dangerous villain out of the two by far; I am a fan of his, but how he destroyed Coulson’s morals at cost of his own life? Brutal. This is what Coulson got from messing with a suicidal man – but we have digressed). Wen did in S2 as Palamas, (primarily in the first half of the season), and then in S4 as the LMD version of herself. Actually, everyone in the ‘main cast’ of AoS S4 got replaced by LMDs at that time – and later on they got to play slightly different versions of themselves, (including Dalton as Ward, cough), so Gregg playing a different character that just happens to look like someone else, cough, from the past is nothing new.

…Furthermore, Gregg’s new character just happens to look exactly like the old main male lead who had conveniently died between S5 and S6, so there’s no conflict of interest, and no need to juggle two roles and being the showrunner for at least the S6 premiere episode either. Consequently, odds are he will not be killed-off in the first few episodes, because AoS needs Coulson.

Well no, not really, but the cast and crew of AoS clearly consider Gregg to be an integral part of the team or something, so he is going to stay at AoS for S6 at least. I may be wrong, but I am still making this bet. (There are noises that AoS is going to be cancelled in summer 2019, but considering that it just got revamped by being associated with the MCU’s CM movie, it is not very likely). Ergo, his new character will probably be redeemed or something along those lines, as the AoS S6 title promo implied. AoS already planned to do something like that in S2 with Ward, but then they threw a curveball…the end of that. Coulson/not Coulson will probably be luckier, cough, but where were we?

…Talking about movies, I suppose. A trailer for yet another film came out today – ‘Crawlers’. Basically, it is a monster movie about an Anglo-American heroine, her father and dog, getting stuck in a hurricane-driven flood with some monstrous alligators who eat people. Oh Hell.

Where to begin? First, there are supposedly three species of crocodilians living in the U.S.: the American Alligator, (2-5 m long), the American Crocodile (2-4 m long) and the Spectacled Caiman (1-2 m long). The latter is an introduced species, yet another exotic reptile that escaped into the wilds of Florida and the rest of the southeast USA. Of the three, the American Alligator is the most common, but also – is the most retiring and does not like to attack, kill and eat humans as a rule. The American Crocodile and the Spectacled Caiman are more aggressive, but they also have a smaller range than their Alligator relative does; plus I am honestly not sure that there are wild/feral Spectacled Caiman living on the USA territory – the sources are controversial and can go either direction. What is the point?

…My point that the alligators of ‘Crawlers’ are unrealistic, and given that we see the movie’s main character destroying their eggs, they are unreal. Unlike the eggs of fish and amphibians, the eggs of reptiles must be kept dry and out of water; the nest of crocodilians, (including the gharials, the most aquatic of them all) are always kept well away from the water, and the mother crocs and gators bring the young to the water via a journey, (short or otherwise), in their jaws – just look at a BBC or a NatGeo crocodile special, for example. If there was a flood in a crocodile or alligator nesting area, it would be a disaster, as their nests and eggs would be lost. (Yes, just as their bird/dinosaur cousins’ crocodilians make nests. They are different from bird nests, but still nests). Ergo, no gator (or croc, or caiman) nests in a hurricane/flood area – they do not really exist. ‘Crawlers’ reptile monsters’ offspring just wouldn’t be able to survive – baby crocodilians are really fragile and vulnerable, unlike their parents…

Back to C&D, since on one hand, they already have a doppelganger of their own – Mayhem, via detective O’Reily – and on the other, they are located in the southeastern USA, where alligators and etc. live, but not really. It is already clear that Dy is in trouble and Ty is going to save her, and she will save him, and together they will rock, as they rocked in the ‘Shades of Grey’ comic. Good luck to them!

…This is it for this time; see you next time!

FH: Hitokiri - April 27

Let us talk, for a change, about FH, and its’ newest character – Hitokiri. Supposedly, this name/title means ‘executioner’, but even minimal research reveals that rather it means – if translated directly from Japanese – ‘manslayer’ or ‘mancutter’, because of the subtleties of Japanese language (and of Japanese to English translation). Okay. What is next?

So, the FH creative team designed Hitokiri to look like an executioner, or perhaps – THE Executioner from MCU; certainly, Hitokiri confers a similar feel to the MCU’s real life version from the ‘Thor: Ragnarok’ movie; why did the FH creative team decide to make him a Samurai than anything else is another question: there’s nothing inherently Japanese, or even Oriental, about executioners. Yes, they were going for an anti-hero here, just as how they did with Vortiger/Black Prior for the knights, but if with Black Prior that made him/her almost into a specific person, (reminiscent of Apollyon, remember her?), with Hitokiri they went rather the other way and made him/her almost oblique and personality-less. Maybe that was supposed to be intended, but it is still weird.

Now, in regards to the weapon – what is it? It is an ono, a Japanese version of axe or hatchet. Unlike the Vikings’ Dane axe and battle-axe, FH’s ono has two sides; in reality, there had been only one. It was used as a weapon of war, but also for other purposes; in fact, it was only rarely that the Japanese used their axes for war. Usually, it were not the samurai proper who used them, but rather the sohei – warrior-monks, or the yamabushi, (mountain hermits). Does Hitokiri look like a Japanese warrior-monk? I honestly cannot say – in FH, appearances and themes usually did not go past the external aesthetics, for it is the sort of a game where everyone tries to kill everyone else, (or at least – everyone else who is not on their team), so anything past appearances is superfluous.

Getting back to weapons, let us get back to Black Prior. As we have discussed him, he was armed with a sword and a kite shield, and we talked primarily about the shield, letting the sword go, since it looked like a one-handed version of Warden’s sword. Apparently, some people claim that it is different. Warden’s sword is a longsword – a typical knightly sword with a straight double-edge blade and a cross-shaped hilt, built to be gripped and used by both hands, whereas Black Prior’s sword is a broadsword, also known as a basket-hilted sword, because its’ hilt was usually shaped like a basket of some sort. It was a military sword, unlike the rapier, which was used more often in civil duels instead, and was invented later than the longsword did, in the Late Modern period, as opposed to the Post-Classical one. Seriously, the precision of some people is overwhelming.

Back to Hitokiri? Honestly – no; so far, Ubisoft deemed that we should know only little about their backstory – a glorified executioner of some sort. Seriously, this is what FH is coming to? Its’ creativity team could use some work, I am thinking.

…This is it for now – see you all soon!

C&D, 'Alignment Chart' - April 25

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. True, the young striped skunk that I came across earlier this week might disagree – when I found it, it was dead, and judging by the snarling expression on the corpse’s muzzle, it had not been a happy death either. Of course, while it probably came from natural causes, it possibly was not the obvious natural cause: while our park has coyotes and red foxes, as well as some semi-feral cats and dogs, none of them will willingly go for a skunk; only the great horned owl does, and I wouldn’t put anything against the northern goshawk either, but there was never any evidence of them living in our park; and the red-tailed and the sharp-shinned hawks that do live there aren’t interested in skunks, even young ones. I’m leaning towards the theory were the skunk youngster perished in one of the recent rainstorms – they can be very bad, and our park gets semi-flooded regularly, and skunks aren’t good swimmers… so there. There are plenty of big holes in this theory too, the main one being that I found the dead animal on the ‘high ground’, which does not get flooded, actually, but still. The skunk is dead, and I am not, not yet, so let us count our blessings and move on to C&D.

This week’s episode, ‘Alignment Chart’, brought…a real life message aimed against human trafficking, which is one of the main elements of C&D S2: Tandy has been taking them on with help of Tyrone and Mayhem, but this time she went alone, and got captured, after her new friend – Mikayla or someone like that – tazed her in the back. Ouch. MCU – and C&D is recognized as a part of it, unlike, say, ‘The Gifted’ - does love a good betrayal. Next week, it seems, Tandy will be for even tougher times, but Tyrone will help.

…Yes, this is the stable of C&D – Ty and Dy are inseparable, metaphorically speaking. On their own, individually, they are defeated easily enough, together – not so much. The Runaways managed it, sort of, in the comics, but these days both them and Ty & Dy are having their own reboots in the comics, going in two very different directions with two very different depictions. The Runaways – in the comics – are trying to get their old gang together, but keep ending up with a new one, featuring new people, such as the Doombot, (a robotic rogue version of Dr. Doom), while Ty and Dy have already gotten together and are established heroes, while the Runaways are move of Avenger-Ish these days.

Back to the TV version of C&D? Unlike ‘Runaways’, it takes less liberty with its’ script, regarding TV vs. comic-verse, but again, it is less exuberant than the ‘Runaways’ are. Not unlike AC in the past, C&D works with a small, tight cast with a small, tight budget, so – no showy special effects as they are in the ‘Runaways’, ‘the Gifted’, and especially AoS. Did people notice that there were no AoS representatives at the red carpet premiere of ‘Endgame’? They were at CM, but at ‘Endgame’? No. Guess now that they were brought back into the fold, (hopefully), they are not interesting anymore. Of course, I, for one, will try to watch them once they come back in May 2019, but real life being what it is, I make no guarantees.

Back in C&D, Brigid seemed to have gotten some of her mojo back, Tyrone hadn’t killed Connors, (who seems to be genuinely repenting for now), and C&D in general tries to compensate for the lack of showy special effects by having plenty of non-showy ones. Since its’ numbers in S2 remain low, it does not seem to be working. Of course, the fact that it is a YA adventure/drama may have something to do with that – not everyone likes MCU’s take on it, especially with AoS still running around and not down for the count. Pity, because C&D is enjoyable to watch, with just enough sci-fi/supernatural elements, (Ty seems to be using voodoo to find Connors’, for example), to make it different from most police/detective adventure/drama TV shows as well as the other MCU shows, including ‘Runaways’, so there!

…This is it, for now. See you all soon!